By Yasmine Mohammed At the age of six, I bolted out the front doors of my elementary school and ran to give my first-grade teacher a goodbye hug. As I skipped towards my mother, my bubbly mood was snatched away by her stern voice and admonishing stare. “Did you just hug your teacher?” my mother asked. “Yah, I love Mrs. Roth!” “You do not hug non-Muslims! That is disgusting,” she said. She then marched me over to the principal’s office to demand that Mrs. Roth never touch her child again. I sat in…

In recent days, revelations have surfaced about leading community leader and social-sharia-justice activist Mo Dawah having sent lewd texts and priapic personal messages to some women. In a coruscating open letter written exclusively for Sedaa, Dawah says that in an era in which Trump is building walls rather than bridges, and climate change is percolating the environment, this is not the time to hold progressive community leaders to account for being perverts. Dolphins are dying. You may not realise it, given the attention paid to me sending messages…

By Shirin Taber and Rickie Farnes, Middle East Women’s Leadership Network, in partnership with America Matters Religious freedom — the right to practice your religion freely — is one of the greatest merits of the American experience. However, systematic abuses in the name of religion, committed daily against women, cut away at our universal rights and cannot be tolerated. A growing number of Islamists and male-centric communities inside the U.S. treat women as commodities for control and reproduction. Girls are taught that female genital mutilation (FGM) is a right…

By Amina Lone Women and equality rights campaigners nervously await the High Court judgement in the gender segregation case: Ofsted v the Al-Hijrah School in Birmingham. Firmly opening up Parveen’s (Pandora’s) faith and education box again, I predict these types of cases will increase. Educational environments, primary right through to university campuses, are a key battleground for Islamist propaganda. Conversations revert back and forth, in the hope of the faith and faithless finding common ground. The most obvious manifestation of dysfunctionality — complete gender segregation — masked multiple levels…

By Aisha Ali-Khan This is a cross-post The latest Pakistani woman to take a few million direct hits in the past 24 hours has been Pakistani actress Mahira Khan. So what was her ‘crime’, I hear you ask? Well the only ‘crime’, in my honest opinion, that she may be guilty of is not giving a flying hoo ha of what people think of her. Her other crime, if you must know, was to enjoy a cigarette with a male colleague, Bollywood actor Ranbir Kapoor, while at work….

By Jimmy Bangash I couldn’t wash my brothers corpse; “You are no longer Muslim!” Religious prohibitions. Enforced by other Muslims Islam had kept us strangers the last decade of his life, In death it intercedes my attempts to quell our strife As his corpse was lowered to the ground and ground upon it lain, My mother watches from afar; Islam supersedes her pain For women may not linger near; This domain belongs to men, And mothers, sisters, wives & more must segregate again So Far from Son…

Following the report in The Times, we, the undersigned, request a meeting with Amanda Spielman, HM Chief Inspector of Education, to discuss the unacceptable rise of the classroom hijab in state-funded primary schools. Female Muslim children as young as five are increasingly veiled and schools are sanctioning this by including it as part of school uniform policies. This is an affront to the historical fight for gender equality in our secular democracy and is creating a two-tiered form of non-equality for young Muslim girls. At a time of rising religious…

By Aisha Ali-Khan This is a cross-post Last week, a Sunday Times investigation found that 1 in 5 primary schools now listed the ‘hijab’ as a official school uniform policy, even though young girls under the age of puberty are actually exempt from wearing it under accepted Islamic rulings. Campaigners such as Amina Lone, Gina Khan and Shaista Gohir have already brought a lot of attention to this very polemic issue. I hope to outline my own position and help put my previous comments into context with this blog….

By Muna Adil Channel 4 recently attempted to give female Muslim voices a platform after a report titled ‘The Missing Muslims’ described the relationship between British Muslims and the UK government as “broken.” Following the report’s overwhelmingly negative reception, Assed Baig, the senior reporter who presented the package last week, has since left the channel, although he and the network claim this was decided weeks in advance to the airing of the segment. Yet this isn’t the first time Baig has come under fire for supporting controversial views. In 2011, he…

“I joined the Labour Party after seeing so much injustice in my community and in the world. I was expelled from the Labour Party after speaking out against injustice in this world and in my community” – Ameena Lonely, professional trouble maker, subverter of harmony, secular fundamentalist, feminist terrorist, opponent of community leaders. For the first time since the controversy over Ameena Lonely speaking out on honour-abuse, shame-misogyny and Labour’s proximity to reactionary community leader dynamics sparked hurt feelings across humanity, Sedaa spoke to Mo Dawah, intersectional-Islamist, progressive anti-feminist, Labour activist…